One of the Good Guys
by Malenkaya
Summary: There's a thin line between good and evil, one not always intentionally or accidentally crossed. Nobody knows this better than David.


Title: One of the Good Guys

Author: Malenkaya

Rating: T

Disclaimer: I don't own Animorphs. Or the lovely lyrics at the beginning of each part. Those belong to "I Fought In A War" by Belle and Sebastian which I listened to for the entire three hours I spent writing this.

Reviews: Please do. This is my first Animorphs fic, and I'd certainly appreciate it. Feel free to critique (but please make it constructive).

A/N: I have read so many David oriented fanfiction and disliked them all because they never really focused on David as a person, but rather on the Animorphs as the classical heroes and himself as the classic villain. I wanted to write something that explained who he is, where he comes from, why he made those decisions. That's what this little three-parter is meant to be. I fully realize people may find the Animorphs out of character—try to remember that firstly, we are seeing them from David's point of view (as in, he sees them as he wants to see them) and secondly, grief alters people. Enjoy!

**One of the Good Guys**

_I fought in a war, and I left my friends behind me._

My name is David.

And I wasn't a bad guy. At least not before.

Now, things have changed. Given the chance, I like to think I'd be able to take down the Animorphs—kill them, truly and finally this time. Stop Marco's mocking laughter, cut off Jake's sanctimonious lectures and silence Rachel's angry threats.

I like to think that, if I was given the chance to be human again—to trade useless, scrabbling paws and whiskered face for fully capable hands and a mouth ready and willing to threaten and curse—I would be able to take revenge against the people who put me here.

But it wasn't always that way.

I was born in California. In Greenview, to be exact. It wasn't a big town, wasn't a small town, and by the time I'd turned four years old we'd already moved three times.

We moved because of my father, who works with the Secret Security Agency.

From the time I was old enough to understand what my father did for a living, I wanted to be just like him.

Tall and strong, he worked out in most of the hours he wasn't working. I didn't see him much, but when I did, what I saw always impressed me.

He would come home, triumphant from a day of hard work protecting people and saving lives, and kiss my mother and hug me. We would have dinner, and I would hear all the exciting details of all the cool things my dad got to do every day.

My mother would watch us, watch this strange father-son interaction, with a quiet smile on her face. Sometimes it was a look of worry instead.

I remember a conversation I heard between the two of them, just before we moved to Los Angeles.

It was late, and I had tiptoed out to get a drink of water and heard voices in their bedroom.

Being a naturally curious child, I'd slipped over to listen in.

It sounded like my dad was getting dressed—whenever his work needed him, he would get up, get dressed, and go.

It made my mother worry, but I thought it was cool. Just like something a superhero would do.

"David idolizes you, Michael," my mother had said, an almost wistful tone to her voice. I'd wondered if it was true, and thought of all the Halloweens I'd dressed up like a cop, all the times I'd stayed awake long past my bedtime listening to the adventures my dad got to take part in every day.

"What's wrong with that?" my dad had responded. He sounded tired, so I knew he'd talked about this with my mother before.

My mother had laughed, but it hadn't been happy. "I worry about you, Michael. Your work is dangerous, and every time you go out I'm not entirely sure you're coming home."

"It's part of the job," my father had said curtly, and my mother had sighed.

"I know that," she'd said. "But David is—sensitive. And he's a good kid."

I'd cringed, hearing that. Sensitive? That was a wimp word. Nobody would ever call my dad sensitive, I knew that much for sure.

"I just don't want him getting involved in fights and wars that have nothing to do with him," she'd finished emotionally.

I guess my dad didn't like her saying that, because he started for their bedroom door without answering. I heard his footsteps and ran, not wanting to be caught listening.

Los Angeles was a world of sun and fun, where boys walked around without shirts and girls wore bikinis on the streets outside. My mother thought it was disgraceful.

I watched my father work outside, watched his tanned muscles glisten in the sun, and looked at my own pale chest and skinny arms with dismay.

By the time we moved to Washington, it had finally started to set in that I wasn't anything like my father.

Where he was brave, I was afraid; and where he was strong and powerful, I was still skinny and small. Years of moving constantly had made me a loner—I got used to being the "new kid", and stopped caring about the label it entitled. I stopped trying to make friends.

I got a cat and called it Megadeth, and my father brought me a snake home and I called that one Spawn and told people this as if it meant something. As if embracing other superheroes and winners meant I could be one by proxy.

I think even I had stopped believing it by then.

I would troll the construction site late at night. It was right outside our home and right next to the mall, a broken down world full of misshapen rooms and abandoned equipment. My mother said it was dangerous.

I pretended it was. I pretended there were thieves and killers lurking behind every unfinished wall, and that by being there, I proved I was brave.

It was there, set carefully between two of those perilous walls, that I found the blue box.

The next day I met the Animorphs, and everything changed.

_I fought in a war, and I left my friends behind me_

_To go looking for the enemy, and it wasn't very long_

It was Marco, first. All-knowing, mocking, oh-so-_funny_ Marco that caught me with the blue box and told the others.

I was too busy dealing with attacking birds and trying to sell the apparently priceless blue hunk of plastic on the Internet to think much of it at the time.

After all, I was the new kid again. What did some idiot mean this time?

It's ironic, actually, that he was the only person I made the slightest motion to trust after the whole bird incident. Looking back now, I wonder if maybe I shouldn't have told someone else instead.

I don't wonder if I would have given up the blue box, because I wouldn't have. Despite the outcome, that blue box gave me the only semblance of adventure I was ever going to get to experience in my quiet, miserable life.

The next day was a blur of incoherent violence, a collection of brutal words and desperate pleas and misshapen _aliens_ that left my world in chaos, with both of my parents Controllers. In the space of an hour, I was threatened, assaulted, shoved through a wall and thrown out of my own house by the people who called themselves the good guys.

I was trapped in a world where even my own identity wasn't safe anymore.

When I woke up, the first thing I saw was Marco. For once, he wasn't smirking.

There were four others, too. A strange looking boy I hadn't seen before, but the rest were familiar.

The blond boy with eyes that looked too old for his age. I recognized him as Marco's best friend. Jack, or something. I'd seen them talking.

The tall, pretty blonde girl with flashing blue eyes. The short black girl, the only one with any degree of compassion on her face—the rest all looked suspicious.

I had seen them all together before.

And the hawk that perched above them all, like he belonged.

Maybe that was just the head injury thinking.

"Who are you?" I'd asked.

It hadn't surprised me that Jack—Jake—had been the one to answer.

"We're the people who are going to totally change your world, David."

That was how I met the Animorphs.

Cassie, who had looked so plain but was so pretty in a different way, with her welcoming smile. I stayed at her home, I ate her food, and was convinced she was the only one who particularly cared at all about me. The only one who wasn't too intoxicated by the battle to forget about me, the boy who'd lost his home, his parents, and everything imitating a life within moments.

Try as I might, knowing the title role she took in trapping me in morph, I still find it impossible to feel resentful towards her.

Ax, the disturbingly pretty boy, and Tobias, the hawk. Interchangeable to me. Despite the way they interacted with the group—obviously the rest thought of them as part of their race, even if I didn't—I couldn't see them as human. I barely spoke to them. They barely spoke to me.

It made it easier, later, to attack them both and leave them for dead.

Marco, who treated me like the new kid until the end of it all. Like because his mother was a Controller too, he had a right to put me down despite the circumstances. He treated me like I was stupid and didn't even bother trying to hide it.

In some ways, the honesty was refreshing.

I still hated him for it.

And Jake. Brave, leader Jake. Sanctimonious Jake, who at first tried to pretend he felt bad for me, pretended even to want to help me and then turned around and told me there were other things more important than my life at stake. Who snapped at Marco for a few of his insults, but let the other ones go without a care in the world. Who ordered me to risk my life, to fight for their cause when they were the ones who dragged me into this mess in the first place.

I knew that he was human when I tried to kill him, tiger morph or not.

But I would be lying if I said I wasn't even the slightest bit happy to finally get one over him, to finally take back control over my life for that one simple moment.

Rachel was a whole other story all together, and I walked a fine line between idolizing and hating her.

She was beautiful, and like any teenage boy, when I first saw her, I developed a crush.

By the end, it was so much more than that.

She reminded me of my father. Brave, and strong, and seemingly fearless. She embodied everything I wanted to be, and yet, by being so, could see better than all of the others how weak I truly was.

It was personal long before she threatened me and I returned the favor.

Maybe I started off liking them. Maybe, when I could appreciate Cassie's compassion, take comfort in the indifference between Ax and Tobias and I, laugh at Marco's kinder jokes, believe Jake's lies, and imagine being as brave as Rachel one day, things were pretty good between us all.

But they couldn't relate to me, despite how they tried. Cassie had a family, and Ax and Tobias weren't human.

So Rachel's parents were divorced. So Jake's brother and Marco's mother were Controllers.

Boo hoo.

They still had a family to go home to every night. They still had a warm bed, a home that was all their own, where they could go and feel safe at night. They could go to school, and to the mall. They had lives.

And I? Had _nothing._

So yeah, I took it personally when they tried to relate to me. When Jake told me saving the world was more important than caring about me.

Because it was easy for him to say, wasn't it? I'm sure that if it had been Marco, or Cassie in my position, he would have been falling all over himself to help them.

They couldn't begin to understand me—most of them didn't even try—and I quickly grew to resent them and the way they ordered me around.

Calling me a coward when I tried to turn myself in—as if they cared about anything but their own safety! And I was _scared._ I was fourteen years old, in the first thing even relative to a combat situation, and yeah, I was scared.

They treated me like I was a criminal.

But things changed when I realized, that for the first time in my life, it didn't have to be that way. I didn't have to be the new kid anymore.

Because see, I had the same powers they did. I didn't have to be the weakling anymore—I was just as powerful as they were.

Once I realized that, there was no stopping me. Lies became outright treachery became assaults and finally murder.

I washed my hands of it, and whispered excuses.

They weren't human, none of them. Just animals.

And I was in control of my life again. That was what mattered.

There was a time when things were almost okay again, when I became Saddler.

I came back to a home, with two parents that loved me and an extended family that almost smothered me with their concern and love. It hurt to realize that I could hardly remember receiving that kind of affection. What was only days had evolved to what felt like years since I had joined the Animorphs.

I got to see Rachel and Jake every day, too. Rachel stayed over a couple days after I came home—I was family, after all.

And all of the Animorphs figured I was going to smother Jake in his sleep or something if they left him alone in his own house.

I kind of liked that parallel. It seemed fitting, since Jake was responsible for my not even _having_ a home, that he couldn't feel safe in his own anymore.

So I got to threaten them when we were alone, whisper threats in Rachel's ear at the table and laugh like I was telling a joke, watching as she forced herself to laugh along.

I got to detail to Jake everything I planned to do to him and his friends in full view of his family, so he had to smile and nod and pretend like we were just two cousins, reminiscing about life before my terrible accident.

Some part of me knew what I was doing was wrong. Saddler's parents were nice people, and what I was going to do to them was wrong.

Because I wasn't going to stay with them once I had the blue box. I wasn't evil—I would disappear, and leave them to grieve for the son that had been mercilessly hidden in the alcoves of the Pediatrics Intensive Care Unit.

Things changed.

It took my breath away when I looked at Saddler's mom they night I came home and saw my own mother's eyes.

The resemblance shouldn't have surprised me. Jake and Rachel were both blond, very Caucasian looking and Jake had the same brown eyes I did. It was just a question of genetics.

But Saddler's mom looked so much like my own—the same eyes, the same hair and gentle smile, and I could let that fill in the blank spots, where their hairstyles and voices didn't match.

She even loved me—loved _Saddler_—the same way my mother had loved me.

While my father's compassion had been fleeting, his care limited to the times he told me stories or the rare occasions on which he was proud of me, my mother's love had always been all-encompassing, even when it was entirely wrong-headed. When she would scream at me to stay off the road, call the police if I was half an hour late getting home from school, and rush me to the ER whenever I ran a temperature three degrees above normal—these things were annoying, but proof my mother loved me.

Saddler's mom was the same. She fretted over me, tucked me in every night despite the fact Saddler was sixteen years old now. Kissed me on the forehead, and even offered to sing to me once.

Maybe it was because I was just recovering from a car accident.

But I had a feeling this was how Saddler's mom always treated him.

And I started to think that maybe I wouldn't leave. Maybe I would change my plans. Maybe I would get the blue box, and leave with them, and start all over again, with a family that loved me and all my newfound power.

But the funny thing about power is that it does corrupt.

And in the end, I got a little carried away.

I'm not ashamed of what I did.

I'm not.

And they won in the end, anyway. They trapped me, and sent me here, and without my powers I was nothing again.

I spent the first few days convinced I wouldn't survive. There were other rats here, and there was food here.

But I still had my human mind, and I still couldn't shake the knowledge that I wasn't one of those rats—that knowledge that kept me awake at night, screaming, "I'm human! I'm human!"

Eventually, I got used to it. I let myself forget. I stopped thinking about how to escape, and started worrying about how to live.

No, not to live. How to survive.

And I did survive. I survived for—years. Decades. I surprised myself with how long I survived.

Only to have the chance to change it all—again—when something called the Crayak found me.

It took me a minute to remember who I was. What had happened to me.

I was surprised to realize that only two years had gone by.

He—it—offered me a deal.

My life, as it was. The same power to morph. My humanity.

He wanted Jake dead in return, and Rachel alive. Both human, and there was a particular emphasis on that. The others didn't matter.

I wanted my parents back. I wanted my _life _back, not just my body.

But the onslaught of memories, the recollection of all that had been done to me left me with a healthy amount of rage towards the Animorphs that pushed aside any hesitation I might have felt.

I accepted.

_Before I would stand with another boy in front of me  
And a corpse that just fell into me, with the bullets flying round_

It should have taken time to get used to being human again, but it didn't. Maybe the Crayak meant for it to be that way. Maybe I just remembered. I don't know.

I morphed to Golden Eagle. What had once been disgusting to me was now intoxicating, watching myself change, shedding my weak humanity and all the awful memories the island had left me with.

I flew to Rachel's first.

I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do. But Crayak had given me a deadline of seventy two hours, and I wanted to get Jake out of the way first.

I wanted to use Rachel to do that. I couldn't kill her, I knew that.

But two years had done nothing to erase that fantasy of warlike perfection, and I wanted to prove that fantasy had been nothing but my own idiotic views, warped by a lifelong idolization of my father and that first, wrongheaded attraction to her.

When I reached her house, a half an hour had already gone by. I thought I'd remembered where all the Animorphs lived.

But things changed. The landmarks I had used to find it once—the swimming pool three doors down from her, the extravagant gardens next door—had been filled in, eradicated, and I'd had to rely on the basics instead.

Life as a rat had left me with a paranoid fear of time, and I barely waited until I'd flown in through one of the windows on the lower level before demorphing immediately.

I watched the clock on top of the television as I went through the changes.

It was almost three o'clock—Rachel would be home from school soon.

I received the shock of my life when Rachel rounded the corner into what I realized now was the living room and stopped dead.

There was a brief moment when we both just stared.

Then I leapt at her.

There was a struggle, of course—Rachel was just as recklessly violent as a human as she was in morph. Neither of us had time to morph, and we rolled across the carpet, grabbing onto whatever we could find that was useful. A book, the television remote.

But we were sixteen now, and I remembered those words so long ago:

_"I don't need a morph to handle you."_

_"You know, maybe you forget this sometimes, but you are a girl, Rachel."_

It probably wasn't fair, but it was a question of simple physical strength, and so it didn't take more than a few minutes before I had her on her back, straddling her with my hands around her throat.

She was losing. She knew it—I could see it in her eyes.

Still she fought, weakly, to the end. Until she was unconscious. I climbed off her, shaking, a byproduct of the physical exertion.

It wasn't fear. It couldn't be fear.

I acquired her. Called Jake. Asked him to come over.

It wasn't hard. It should have been, and through it all I felt like something was wrong.

I tried to ignore it, as I demorphed and hauled Rachel to an upright position so I could tie her hands behind her.

Her throat was bruised, and I tried to ignore that too.

"Only human," I said out loud to no one.

I left her there, and waited. Restless, I began poking around in the cupboards, in the drawers, not wanting to look at Rachel. Not wanting to think about what I was going to do.

I'd thought it would be easy to do this, but as the time ticked by, I grew increasingly more fearful at the idea of taking a human life.

But it was _my_ life at stake here. And I wouldn't let it go. Not just because I felt _guilty._

Because did Jake feel guilty leaving me as a rat? Of course not. There were "larger issues" at stake.

I wasn't in the wrong here. I was just doing what I needed to do.

It made it a little bit easier when I made my way into the hallway and found the gun.

It was a black revolver, up high where little kids couldn't reach—I guess it belonged to Rachel's mother. I wasn't sure. I didn't really care.

I had just found my answer.

I hadn't lived with my dad and heard his stories for years without learning how to shoot a gun. I'd been at the shooting range since I was ten years old, and had become a pretty good marksman.

I would look at Jake, and I would see that cardboard cutout on the range—not a person—and I would shoot. Rachel would still be unconscious, and I would leave. I wouldn't have to deal with the repercussions.

I took it, and went back downstairs. And waited.

The door opened. I heard Jake's voice. "Rachel?"

I swallowed, hard, and readied my grip. I was just around the corner, waiting for Jake to walk through the kitchen and into my view.

Slow footsteps. A whisper. Was there someone else here? Another Animorph?

_Doesn't matter, _I reminded myself. _Just go._

"Rachel?" Again, that question just starting to border on suspicion.

A flash of color around the corner.

A girl's laugh, too short to be Jake—

And I'd already pulled the trigger.

I watched, in horror, as the kid crumpled and fell, blood blossoming across the pale pink playsuit like a rose in winter.

It wasn't Jake. It hadn't been Jake. The footsteps had been her's.

I heard the pounding footsteps as Jake raced around the corner.

"Sara!" he cried out. "Sara, I told you to stay on the porch—"

It took a moment for everything to set in. To realize that his cousin was bleeding, that it was almost surely fatal. That his other cousin was sprawled out on the floor, probably dead.

That I was standing there, staring at him.

I thought about pulling the trigger, but I'd already dropped the gun.

A myriad of emotions passed over Jake's face. Horror, as he realized what had happened. Desperation, as he thought of the others and wondered if they were next. Guilt, because for some reason, everything always had been Jake's fault.

He was the leader, after all. He should have seen this coming.

And rage when he looked right at me again.

I clenched my hand into a fist.

Then I turned and ran, ran for what seemed like miles until I tripped and lay sprawled in the dust, lost in the wilderness, surrounding by road and dirt and concrete.

He didn't follow me.

For two days I stayed out of sight.

On the third day, I went to the funeral. Some morbid sense of curiosity forced me to.

What I saw at first was a lot of black. A stained glass window. The strangled sounds of people trying to sing through the tears.

I'd thought that I would stand out in my dirty black shirt and bike shorts, with cuts and scrapes across my fact and hands.

Nobody gave me a second glance. They were too preoccupied in their own grief.

Far up ahead, I saw them. Jake and Rachel again, with their family.

Rachel looked calm, if miserable. She stood tall, and the bruises on her neck had been carefully covered with makeup.

A casual observer would think that she was okay, or in shock. That she wasn't taking all this in.

Only her grip on the pew ahead of her, so tight her knuckles were white, gave her away.

Jake looked exhausted, and that same thread of guilt ran through him, into everything he did. When he dropped his head, when he placed a careful hand over Rachel's or said a soothing word to his mother, it showed in every movement.

The other Animorphs were a few feet back. The strangely pretty boy that I knew now was Ax, looking blank. Tobias at his side, in human morph, staring ahead at Rachel with blatant concern. Marco, the smirk on his face for once perpetually gone, his laughter silenced. And Cassie, shedding her own tears.

She'd known Sara too.

I concentrated on the coffin instead. On the tiny white coffin, overtaken by flowers and the sparkly confetti Sara apparently had loved.

She was—had only been—seven years old.

I watched as, up ahead, Rachel's other sister collapsed in tears. As her mother made a helpless attempt to comfort her, and her father tore his own gaze away from the coffin long enough to join in the effort.

I looked down at my hands and felt sick. I couldn't stay here.

I ran, shoving my way out of the pew at the back and hurrying to the back of the church. I could feel their stares on my back, each set of eyes feeling like an unspoken and true accusation.

There was a staircase down and to the right of the front doors. I took one look at the limos outside, waiting for the grieving party, and took the stairs instead.

They lead to a corridor, with bathrooms to the right and an open room on the left, probably used for church events. The door was open.

I came to a stop, and tried to remember to breathe.

I didn't hear the footsteps until it was too late.

The heavy brass smashed into the back of my head, and I staggered. The candlestick fell down next to me.

Rachel didn't give me time to recover before she attacked.

She was human, still painfully human—for once her face was covered with no makeup, leaving her rage and pain horribly clear to see.

There were no threats this time; she didn't need them.

She was hitting me, but the punches were ineffectual, marred by tears and blind fury, and before I knew it, Jake was pulling her back.

He held her away, ignoring her as she tried to hit him too, trying to curse and sobbing too hard to get the words out. Jake bit his lip hard, obviously trying to keep his own emotion at bay even as Rachel just collapsed, abandoning her attempts to escape and gripping him tightly in return instead.

I stared, horrified.

_But wasn't this just what you wanted?_ A little voice inside my head sing-songed. _To bring Rachel down a peg or two? To prove that she was human? To make Jake pay for all his mistakes?_

_To ruin the Animorphs?_

"Not like this," I pleaded. "I'm sorry."

I had spoken out loud.

Jake stared at me, from where he was holding Rachel up. I could hear more footsteps now, the cavalry no doubt. Cassie. Marco. Tobias. Ax.

Jake was shaking. "Get out, David. And stay away."

I nodded. I was shaking too, and had no arguments left. Everything was marred, covered by the blood on my hands.

"If I see you here again," Jake said shortly, "I'll kill you."

There was no trace of a lie in his eyes. This was a leader, pushed to his breaking point, sworn to protect the lives of his team.

I nodded.

And I morphed back to a golden eagle as the rest of the Animorphs flooded into the room, surrounding Jake and Rachel.

I flew away. They watched me go, with hatred in their eyes.

I flew aimlessly for the next few hours, wondering where to go. What to do.

Who would take in a killer like me?

_But I have to do something,_ I reminded myself.

Seventy two hours had turned into three.

Then I became a rat again.

Forever.

It was close to the two hour mark when I finally stumbled back into the dusty ground and demorphed.

I knew what I had to do.

I remorphed. Same morph.

And flew back to the island.

I used my newfound powers to morph back into a rat, the same body that I had lived in, cursed and survived in for two years.

I forced myself to wait out those two long, agonizing hours.

Crayak's gift evaporated the moment I hit the one hundred twentieth minute, and I felt it slip away, like sand through my fingers.

I was a rat again. Things were back to normal. Everything was okay again.

But not really.

My name is David.

I'd had one chance—my only chance to regain any semblance of life.

I gave it up.

Because of a little girl.

Because I'm one of the good guys.

Right?


End file.
